


Fishhooks

by lionsenpai



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Gen, when ur captain finds this journal floating in the sky they gain one searing enigma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-06 19:23:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20512211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionsenpai/pseuds/lionsenpai
Summary: An immigrant from the 'Neath.  A skyfarer carrying the hooks of broken promises in her mouth. An unsavory type masquerading as an eager pragmatist. A charlatan at the pulpit of known and unknown gods. A zealot with a Song seared upon her soul, so despairingly thorough that not even devils can scour it away.The end Archivist Bell meets will be miserable and radiant, and they will skirt the edges of her fallout for ages to come





	Fishhooks

**Author's Note:**

> im not far enough into the game to be making the kind of Bold Lore Implications i am, but its all Sexy so i wont stop

#### 'October 14, 1903

  
  
There _is_ a Song. I’m finally certain. I thought Mostyska was star-touched, but it has sung gear-toothed melodies for the past week, and we are too far from the Clockwork Sun for it to be the light in my bones. Supplies are dwindling out here on the edge of nothing, but I can scarcely give the order to return to familiar ports. I hear the Song in the engine room. I hear it in the wind winnowing through the hull. I hear it, sometimes, in flick of my Navigator's eyes across starcharts, or the way I look in mirrors when I can't sleep. 

There are few hours now when I cannot hear it, but when I reach for it in the between, it recoils like the tides. My past in the Archives compels me to write, but I cannot trap it with the Word. I can never steady my hand. I can never begin, and at this rate, I fear I never will.

When I first searched Mostyska's journal, I begrudgingly admired the depths of her jealous secrecy. I wondered if she refused to write a note of it to spite me it's beginning, but now I think she never managed to put it to ink. It is timorous. Picky. It sits in my head like a shadow at the heart of the Sun, there and not, bleached out.

I have transcribed the life's works of Masters, and not a single Word is worth the first note of the Song.

I'm cautious to commit its existence to my journal without a single cadence to prove I'm not star-touched to the one who inherits my journal, but... Mannah's memory sits on my chest. I hunch at my desk short of breath with the weight of it. I need to put something to ink. To Word. I cannot meet her with nothing. And if I cannot write the Song, I will write around it.

That, I hope, will be enough to stir some greater understanding in me.

I have to start with the crash. I would have never found the Song without it.

I was new to the sky then, fresh out of Port Prosper and desperate for work. I had no other prospects, but sky-captains always need more hands. I was a mourner turned sailor, and it had been a miserable metamorphosis.

At that time, _The Exaltier_ was still under Captain Mostyska's command, and she was chasing the tailwinds of something big in Traitor’s Wood. The First Mate warned her about the dangers, but I had served under her long enough to know she wouldn’t heed him. The crew was a raw nerve. I couldn’t sleep the whole night before the Marauders caught us. 

It’s hard to believe I couldn’t hear it then, laying there in my bunk, but I was sick with regrets. I wondered why I’d left the Archives. Why I'd forsaken the Word. Why I'd ever left the 'Neath at all. The cabin I shared with three others had yielded to a burrowing, fungal sprout two weeks before, and the sky drifted in flecked with pollen and the calls of the Reach. There was frost on the window. I lay trembling beneath my little blanket and made myself sick with yearning. That night, I remember time like a hangnail: festering, painfully. 

I told myself it was the last voyage, promises be damned. I’d rather be an oath-breaker twice over than spend the rest of my life like this. I decided I’d unpack myself at the next port and find something else for Mannah's memory. 

I woke to our hull yawning open to the great, wide sky. I’d missed the whole fight, because it was over in one shot. Mostyska loved to make _The Exaltier_ run quarter-staffed and bleeding fuel. 

The after was standard. The Marauders gathered the remnants of us and corralled us in Mostyska's cabin while they raided the supplies. There in the stink and claustrophobia of what remained of us, I saw the Navigator stand and begin to roll the starcharts off Mostyska’s desk. He tucked them carefully into his belt and we all knew. 

Later, I found out she’d been on the riggings when we were hit. The impact had thrown her over the railing. If it were anyone el

I’m getting distracted. I’ve charted _The Exaltier_ farther from the edges of the sky, where the Song is loudest, and it’s grown so wane. My hand has stopped shaking. I need to finish and return before I lose the sound of it entirely.

A few of the crew prayed. I had finished with that a decade past and never learned to pray without paper anyway. I stole her journal and a handful of little things that had spilled across the floor before anyone else could claim them. 

We squabbled over her treasures until the Marauders returned. They were star-touched, and after shaking us down, left with their treasures. I was lucky I had been left to wallow on the bleak, Escherian streets of the Avid Horizon for so long. They couldn’t find the journal or the rest when they came to me.

When they left, we forgot our squabbles and salvaged what we could of the ship. They’d left us no food but crumbs, but there was fuel still in the boiler’s tank; too much trouble to steal. _The Exaltier_ limped and belched pieces of hull, but we turned it to Port Avon and banked our hopes on a miracle. We got lucky: a strong northerly wind carried the crumbling pieces of _The Exaltier_ most of the way. 

We had wagered when the wind had just caught us that _The Exaltier_ would break apart in the stream and rain down on Old London. We had tethered ourselves to our workstations in the case that it did, so that we would all go together.

I was commanded to stoke the engine through the night to keep us burning just enough fuel to avoid the reaching wilderness of Traitor's Wood. The ship groaned and whined around me with the fury of the tailwind, and the engine hissed steam until condensation dripped down the walls. I had never tasted a burn so impure, but I could scarcely keep my mind on my work. My thoughts circled home like vultures.

In the midst of that noise and grimy desperation, I heard it. It was the first time. I had not even opened Mostyska's journal yet. 

It was. Soft. I recall it at the edges of all hearing, at first. I stood listening for some time. Its cadence was perfectly smooth, like a ream of mourning spun on itself, lemniscate-endless. I thought the crew had started up a tune to carry our spirits through the night, but when I turned from the engine, it quieted. I couldn't hear it. Not until I returned to my task. The melody was steam and heat. It was like inhaling smoke and holding it in. The condensation on the walls was vermilion and gold.

My next memory is of being dragged from the engine by two more of the crew. I'd dumped the rest of the fuel into the boiler and set the engine screaming with exertion. When they entered, they found me at the grate, staring into the flames. I didn't fight them. I felt as though I hadn't slept in days. 

I wouldn't have believed their tale if I hadn't suffered arc eye for the next two nights. It burned even when I managed to sleep, like hot iron in my sockets.

The crew locked me away until we reached Port Avon. They thought I was star-touched. I wondered that myself, dreaming of nebulae crashing like cymbals, their stardust swept into neat rows of blank sheet music. For two years after that, I still wondered in the private of night, when I was still acquiring a taste for the bottle and oblivion. I'm sure now. Certain. 

I woke three nights ago

No, I'll finish the story. When we docked in Port Avon, they let me out. I was better. They had given me paper and pen and I’d written of Mannah, just a little. The Word hadn’t been my master in months, but the act of it still brought me peace. Reminded me of the Archives and my life before.

Anyway, there was nothing else to do with me unless they wanted to kill me, so I was freed. The rest of the crew disembarked and headed for the lush, green lawns of the city. Even the Officers. What could be done with a broken locomotive? _The Exaltier_ had shuddered to a halt upon docking and had moved no more. It was scrap metal.

I couldn't leave it though. It was nothing but fortune that I didn't turn my back on it that day. I had my plans to start a new life, maybe even return to the 'Neath to visit the rocky shore where Mannah was buried and apologize, but... I couldn't leave it. 

When they finally towed _The Exaltier_ from the docks so that other captains could land, I was the only one for the inspector to sign her over to. Mostyska had a little in the bank, and with the things I'd saved from her cabin, I was able to make repairs--just barely. 

_The Exaltier's_ been mine ever since, and she has treated me obligingly. 

I learned her aches and sighs quickly after pulling a Repentant Devil and Mostyska’s old Navigator on board. With them, I crossed the Reach and charted Albion. I recruited a full armament of Officers to help me. I sit comfortably upon my spoils. I even wrote, thinking vainly of the promise I made to Mannah and the hope that I might still make good on it. 

But the Song never left me.

Mostyska’s journal I’d kept, and I found myself leafing through it in wane hours of the night. I’d used it to begin my own starcharts, and I’d remembered the Song, her hesitant mentions of its beauty. I gleaned every detail from her Words, and when dreams of it came like gant lovers in the night and I woke to broken bottles on the floor, I sailed to Carillon for a cure. 

The devils there said the soul has many possible afflictions. They said mine was an Absence. 

There was a great clamor about it. It wasn't the affliction of a human or a devil. The Repentant Devil on board smiled at me, thinly, and advised me that there was nothing the amateurs of Carillon could do for me. He intimated he was not nearly so useless. 

We convened in my cabin with wine and with tea. The bottle loosened my tongue, and I confessed the whole of my life to him. Everything. Mostyska and the crash, and my life before that. My work in the Archives below. My faith. How I lost it. I told him about Mannah: the way she clicked her teeth during Contemplation Hours and the birthmark behind her knee which she called Salt's Rub, which she touched for luck. Her script, the way her hand moved across the page with loving devotion.

She was a true believer in the Word. Nothing superseded the Word. It trapped every thought and ambition in bilious ink and consigned them to eternity. Reality bent to the Word. Death calcified it. Set it free.

Gods and all the fury of the Zee were but lines in a story.

I told him about her death. Storm's Fury, which infected the Archives with Synaptic Lightning, flicking on and off in neural spasms. They say Synaptic Lightning cages the mind like amber when it flickers around you. I wonder if parts of Mannah rankle in that stubborn infection, the little seizures that spark in the Archives during winter still.

I pray they do. I'm not returning to the 'Neath. I will never write Mannah's legacy into eternity. I have forsaken the Word, except to align my thoughts and chase the Song.

It’s an old pain now, but it still hurts to think of how I have betrayed her twice. Once: that we would not go together. And now twice: the promise that I would not let time bury her. That I would immortalize her in Word.

The Synaptic Lightning that took her will be the last thing to hold her in this world after I'm gone and my memory with me.

She deserved better.

When I finished my tale, it was well past sensible hours. The Repentant Devil had always smelled faintly of brimstone, but that night, he was igneous. His eyes were molten with the blood of suns. When he touched me, I felt it as the caress of well-worn iron. The tea had gone, but I remember his honey-tongued promises. He promised that he could bend my affliction to shape temporarily. He promised he had done it before. He promised my pain would be myriad and exquisite. 

He was right. On all counts, he was right. 

Afterwards, he suggested that I dare the sky's edges and thusly departed _The Exaltier_ at the next port. I haven't seen him since.

He must have known what would happen. I think back now and smell the sulfur on his lips. 

I wish I could thank him.

The Song whistles when _The Exaltier_ skirts the blackest parts of the sky, like a remembrance of the light that once was. I have heard it when she is at her leanest, burning fumes and faith in place of fuel. There is something comforting in it: knowing that the Song will come when we are closest to being lost. I wonder if Mostyska heard it more clearly before her fall... I wonder if it was a comfort to her...

I wonder if it will be a comfort to me, when the sky opens up to swallow me as it did Mostyska.

I hope it will. There is so much more in the sky than I ever knew.

I admit I am not sleeping now. Not for three nights. I can't. I lie in bed and think: of the Song, of its voices, of Mostyska and the Repentant Devil and what they knew. Most of all, I think of that night. 

Three nights ago, I woke without having ever slept, Mostyska's journal in my hands. Tears bled from my aching eyes. I shook like with chill, but I was feverish. The candles in my cabin had died, and puddles of vermilion wax sat in their places. They had been white before. I was sweating fuel. It shouldn't have been possible, but I know that smell, and I know the pain of staring into its burning. 

Around me were the curled pages of Mostyska's journals, ripped from their binding. On them, in my own hand: EXTANT SLAUGHTER

The ink was pyretic with Song. 

Not trapped. Not consigned. _Alive._

I have wept every time I think of it. Gold clouds my vision even now. 

My Navigator asks after my well-being. He must think me going the same way Mostyska did, but... His cabin is next to mine, and I cannot stop my mind wondering what he heard. If the enigmas of that night passed like plague over his doorway. If he saw their strange shadows beneath the door.

I wish I knew the shape of them. I wish I had more to guide me than my own hand upon the page. 

The Word may be immortal, but I trawl its shallows for understanding while its truth lurks like a leviathan beneath me. I would give myself to the waves if only I knew how. 

There is something in me. An emotion I can't name. It is dolorous and vacant. It sings from one mouth with the voices of a grim procession. It is in _The Exaltier,_ but it is in me, and, sometimes, when the night closes around my ship and the sky is deep black and stretches the whole of existence, I feel the echoes of it in far off bodies, like answering tones of tar-pit despair and umbra vengeance.

It will never be satisfied. It has lost too mu

It occurs to me now. I don't know why I didn't see it before. 

The Song is a dirge.'


End file.
